4 Questions for the Artist:
Valerie Martinez's COUNT
Six years ago, the United Nations released this announcement after the meeting of the General Assembly: “Only 11 Years Left to Prevent Irreversible Damage from Climate Change, Speakers Warn during General Assembly High-Level Meeting.” Published in 2019, by this count, we have roughly 6 years, 2 months, 2 days left to prevent climate change catastrophe.
Horribly?, Horrendously?, while climate change events are predicted to increase, the US government is removing climate change information from government websites1, limiting our participation in finding solutions to this global crisis2, and forcing communities and citizens to fend for themselves when disaster does strike.3
Valerie Martinez in her book-length poem COUNT (University of Arizona Press), writes of "the imperiled natural world” with grace and power, collecting the loosened stones of so many of the devastations to our planet. This work, multi-layered into 43 sections, weaves in personal narrative, tales from the land’s indigenous peoples, data of all the disappearances from our natural world as well as the artistry of other makers all to urge us to be attentive to every environmental detail and to become accountable for all our losses. Her question: “Have we ever thought to count these out?”
As Rilke writes, welcome to “the beauty and the terror” of living life on this planet Earth.
Because it is so rich, I’ve selected four different sections from her work after which Valerie responds to my questions. Peter Gilbert composed “As the waters began to rise,” inspired by Count (and performed by Ekmeles) which provides the entire poem accompanied by music and voice. Here is As the waters began to rise by Peter Gilbert to totally immerse yourself. Gilbert performed the world premiere in NYC and Albuquerque.
2 Near the La Luz trailhead, 7,032 feet, we sidestep a thicket— Cylindropuntia imbricata. Drought tolerant, difficult to kill, stippled with bees and magenta blooms, the spaces it fills in the shadows of colossal boulders. We hike up, southeast, watch a lip of brown creep up the foothills, inch by inch, below which the green world disappears. It’s hard not to think akin, continuous, north and south—Greenland with its radical ice melt, the advance of the Atacama Desert— when I hear it: a brimming, a lapping, a sequence of little roars. 3 Let us go now, you and I, to the water—to the girl who stands alone at the sea. The ocean is the color of milk and green-gray leaves. It’s cold, overcast; I can see the goose bumps on her legs. She happens to wear white; she must be 7 or 8. The girl goes to the water—I see her during the day, at night, when looking straight on in that highway-drive hypnotic state. She reminds me of my nieces, the infants they were, the plastic tubs and soapy water, the sounds they made, gurgling while they were bathed. 10 Professor Harold Wanless clicks through a series of images: Florida, Antarctica, a lecture entitled “The Frightening Reality of Sea Level Rise” for the crush of a standing-room crowd including the well-heeled and generously-housed residents of Coral Gables. In the dark we slip into the silence of black and white, a topography so stark even our paper coffee cups seem to gush in comparison. Outside the leafy banyans drip their aerial branches like lions’ tails, and the houses keep shining on—mango, avocado, tangerine—cheerful amnesiacs, while a time lapse depicts shrinking ice sheets, disappearing beachfronts, and the room is so fraught with quiet I stifle the urge to mumble and cough. 11 In anticipation of the great flood, the god Tochopa tucked his young daughter, Pu-keh-eh, into a piñon trunk hollowed and packed with nuts, tubers, healing herbs, hoping she would survive, find another, repopulate the world. As the waters began to rise he sang and prayed, held fiercely to the trunk until he, too, and the woodpile and the houses and the village were subsumed and all he could do, below in the undertow, was let her go. 43 The adolescent goddess Hadanisht’é was encircled by creatures—thin, delirious—reflected in the tears of her people. She punished the tribe for negligence, put them to work reassembling the fragments of a disintegrating world. After much toil each piece— cleaned and burnished—flashed a sliver of sunlight by day, moonlight by night, billions of which could not be looked at directly. In this way they learned to be reverent and disciplined, to live on the edge of great balance—the sum of incalculable beauty.
1. COUNT is your second book-length poem after EACH AND HER. Describe the unique challenges and satisfactions of this particular form, and why a book-length poem about climate change reality and threats felt appropriate.
I promised myself, after writing EACH AND HER, that I would not write a book-length poem again. Especially one in dozens of sections. With EACH AND HER, I almost gave up on the poem in revision, when I had all 72 sections on the living room floor and couldn’t figure out how to put them back together again. Somehow, and believe me it was tenuous, I managed to do it. With COUNT the same challenge was in store, trying to figure out the best order for the sections. The individual poems/sections required the “usual” work of revision, but the arrangement—well, that can take a poet down. In the end, I had a deadline with the University of Arizona Press and I had to finish. But, to this day, there are changes in the order of the sections that I would like to make. O well.
In terms of satisfactions, a book-length poem allowed me to take on a bigger “project.” In this case it was the devastation of climate disruption and, in long form, a love letter to the natural world. Also, each of my eight nieces and nephews appear in the book, members of the generation to which we will leave what we have wrought in terms of climate change. Or, if we choose and are loud and courageous, a livable world for flora and fauna and humans. The book-length poem allowed me to explore these themes within this larger context.
Why a book-length poem about climate change? It seems obvious to me—we are at a critical juncture in terms of saving ourselves and a wide range of endangered plants and animals. My approach was to wave all the red flags AND to encourage a love for creatures and flora and our fellow human beings. So much so that we will change the way we interact with nature and FIGHT for policies that will end the climate crisis. We usually take care of the things we love and if we remember what we love about the earth and its living things, we might fight harder for it.
2. You've told me that the adolescent girl in the poem appeared to you as an impetus for its writing. How did she guide you and what surprised you about her presence?
Ah, yes. That girl! She was dogged. She kept appearing to me, long before I began the poem. In daydreams and night dreams, there she was. An overcast day at the beach. An adolescent girl with her back to me. The sky, before a storm, ominous. And she was delicate, and she would never turn around. Something was coming at her—large and dark. She sparked the beginning of COUNT. And so did a year living in Miami and my bouncing back and forth between the drought-stricken high desert of New Mexico and a storm-torn Florida during the nine months I taught at the University of Miami. Also, climate change has been a major concern of mine for a long, long time, one of the most important ways in which I am an activist. All of these resonate with the themes of COUNT—the children, the climate, the imperiled natural world.
3. Your transitions between myth, your personal present and past as well as startling stats on climate change facts and futures are easeful and sometimes disjunctive. Water-- lack of and too much also carries the poem. What was your process for devising the couplets and how they would progress in each section and in their entirety?
COUNT went through so many forms in the writing process. In one draft all the sections were prose poems. In another draft, tercets. In yet another, poems with staggered lines. But the first version was in couplets inspired, in part, by A.R. Ammons magnificent book-length poem, GARBAGE. And, in the end, I returned to couplets which best “matched” the pace I wanted for the reader, the timing of the eye reading the poem, and the mouth speaking it out loud. There are other resonances, of course, that “bouncing” between a water-starved climate and a water-saturated city. Both places facing climate disaster. And there is also the fraught relationship between a “warning poem” and a “love letter poem” to the planet’s creatures and plants.
4. How did you know/ decide where and when the poem ends and any significance to the number 43?
There’s no specific significance to the number 43, but I am aware that the number 7 (4 + 3) has symbolic meaning for so many religions and spiritual traditions, from Hinduism and Buddhism to Islam, Judaism and Christianity. For the Greeks and the Egyptians, too. In COUNT it was, more than anything, the last poem that needed to be the last section of the book. That section still makes me weep.
Get the book to be one with our beautiful/terrible world.
Footnotes on current events: I originally wrote 2 paragraphs on these matters—but here are my sources instead: Disappearing Data: Trump Administration Removing Climate Information from Government Websites